In my senior yearbook, my sculpture teacher wrote a message I saw as proof of my inadequacy: “To the most sincerest of artists.” Sincerest felt like a slight after a semester of struggling to render ideas in three-dimensions. My projects came out lumpen and out of proportion, like the clay mask my mother and stepfather still display to my chagrin: a wild-haired and goggle-eyed wraith whose frozen, asymmetrical terror would disappoint Medusa—nothing like the wind-swept beauty I saw in my mind in the early stages of the process. To be called the sincerest felt like a patronizing consolation prize—good effort, kid!—when what I wanted to be was good.

Only years later, when I was teaching creative writing at Oberlin during the Obama presidency did I start to think about Sincerity again, and differently. My students’ writing was often sophisticated and formally inventive, and our classroom discussions were dynamic and invigorating. But sometimes I felt something missing, not just in their work but in my approach to it. I had witnessed something similar in my grad school and undergraduate classes on occasion: an almost performative avoidance of sentiment, out of fear of risking sentimentality. Performance is essential to one’s growth as a young artist; we must try on selves and styles to find the voice that is most authentically ours. But sometimes the performance risks becoming the self, in the process losing an essential quality of depth, care, and feeling. In other words, a voice devoid of the quality that once made me wince.

I was thinking about sincerity again when I watched Tracy Chapman sing “Fast Car” at the 2024 Grammys. I tend to avoid award shows in general. They are performative and commercial by nature, usually the opposite of sincere. But as any teary-eyed Gen X-er will tell you, seeing Chapman on that stage singing the anthem from our youth felt different. It was a reminder of the essential sincerity of her work. I saw her in concert in college, and once again in my twenties in Seattle, and both times felt incredibly, wonderfully genuine: her voice was clear and strong, her songs rich, and her smile radiant. The opposite of the Bob Dylan concert I’d seen at Ithaca College my senior year of high school; I’ll never be as close to the stage as I was that night, but I’ve never felt farther from a performer. Dylan seemed to have no interest in connecting with us, his lyrics could not even be identified as words. In contrast, it’s impossible to be in Tracy Chapman’s presence and not sing along; it’s impossible not to feel cared for and hopeful.

This is what it means to me to be sincere in my work these days: to care for myself, the writing, and those who interact with what I put out into the world. In my teaching, that level of sincerity extends to my students’ writing, and our conversations about the feelings of our characters and our feelings as we write those characters; we might fear vulnerability, but there is not a lot to gain by avoiding sentiment because we’ve confused it with the commercial sentimentality of Hallmark cards (and award shows). In the fiction workshop I taught last semester at SUNY Plattsburgh, I witnessed a real embrace of both sincerity and ambition; students’ stories were fresh and inventive as well as radically honest and emotionally generous. In an era of so many crises, including a lack of institutional support for the arts and humanities, sincerity in art feels not just nice but necessary.

Of course, I haven’t stopped wanting to be good. Each writing project I choose for myself contains within it an artistic lesson—in narrative structure, research, tension, etc. I make my attempts, and when I succeed the feeling is better than flying in a dream. And when I fail, I construct another lesson, remembering what it felt like to fly.

I have to admit that although my views of sincerity have changed, my sculpture teacher’s note still has an “A for effort” ring to it. But it also feels kinder and truer than it did to me as an unformed artist. I failed to be good then, but I was nothing if not sincere in my attempts.